New European research from Soil Capital suggests that regenerative farming practices can help protect crop production during drought.

The analysis is based on independently verified, primary data from 1,262 farms across 331,600 hectares in France. It focused on commonly grown European arable crops, including winter wheat, winter barley, winter rapeseed, spring barley, grain corn and potato.

Built through Soil Capital’s regenerative farming transition programme, the dataset combines information on farming practices, yields and soil conditions at field level – data which, according to the organisation, has not previously been available at such a scale or level of granularity.

Until now, evidence linking regenerative agriculture to resilience has been largely limited to individual farm studies or theoretical modelling, Soil Capital said.

In the area where the most detailed evaluation was conducted, yields of the majorly affected crop fell by 22% on the least regenerative farms following the 2023 droughts, compared with only an 8% decline on the highly regenerative farms.

The dataset for the whole of France shows the trend scales, and is statistically significant when other potential drivers such as soil type are controlled. Across cereal crops specifically, 82 of the 96 French regions experienced significant drought in the period. Within these, regenerative practices reduced drought-related yield losses by at least 10% in around 85% of cases.

Andrew Voysey, chief impact officer at Soil Capital, said: “For the first time, we are moving beyond anecdote or modelling to show, through large-scale independently verified field data, how regenerative agriculture can help protect production. That begins to move resilience from a high-level concept towards something that can be understood and managed as a financial risk factor.”

Following the positive early findings, Voysey confirmed that Soil Capital is now collaborating with industry and academic partners to help convert the insights into “more informed, risk-adjusted decision-making”.

Erik Mathijs, head of agricultural, food and resource economics at KU Leaven in Belgium (the initiative’s first academic partner), commented: “There has long been academic interest in how different farming practices can moderate the damaging effects of climate stress on farm output, but what has held us all back is the lack of robust field-level data across large geographies and multiple successive years”.

He added: “Soil Capital’s dataset is unusually strong in this regard and creates an important opportunity to combine our economic and statistical expertise with their agronomic and data science capabilities”.